14 DAY TRIAL // Google is now ready to hand over the Wi-Fi data it has mistakenly acquired with its Street View cars to several of the countries that have requested it for further investigation. The company has said it will allow regulators in Germany, France and Spain to review the data and will hand it over by Saturday. It has already missed a deadline imposed by German data-protection officials for transferring the data.
“We screwed up. Let’s be very clear about that,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Financial Times when asked about the issue. “If you are honest about your mistakes it is the best defence for it not happening again.”
Google is defusing a standoff between the company and regulators in several countries. Still, these are just three countries and there’s no word on whether or when Google will hand over the acquired data to others that may have requested it. Initial reports claimed that Italian regulators would also get access to it, but the FT report now lists just the three countries mentioned above.
The company is also investigating the circumstances that led to its Street View cars gathering ‘payload’ Wi-Fi data from unprotected networks. Google claims it had no knowledge of this until an internal audit revealed that the cars were also storing this data along with the network IDs and other identification information.
The company says the piece of code that acquired payload data ended up in the production software by mistake. An internal investigation of the engineer who allowed this to happen is being carried out, Google says, the results of which will be published.
An external audit is also underway at Google’s request and the results of the study will also be published, once completed. Certainly, some answers are bound to surface in the coming weeks both from Google and from the investigations carried out by data-protection officials. With the data in hand, the regulators should be able to find out if it was truly a mistake or whether there’s more to this than Google is claiming.